There's no time like the present to launch new features. products and services—here's four of the best we've spotted.
Rightmove has had its new agent qualification course approved by the government's regulatory body, The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual).
Ofqual's sign-off means new agents can study towards the Level 3 Certificate for Estate and Letting Agents to improve their professional skillset. The course has been specifically designed ahead of potential regulations that the government may bring in based on the Regulation of Property Agents (RoPA) Report.
More than 2,000 agents have signed up for the course, which will be delivered by a group of renowned industry experts, including Josh Phegan, Dr David Smith and Lesley Horton.
The course will be delivered for free, online and on-demand, with a final examination run by the independent awarding body ABBE.
Sahibinden.com now allows real estate agents to manually create VR tours of their listings through a specialized app.
Sahibinden Pro, property agents can easily and quickly prepare virtual reality tours of “every inch of a house in 3D,” the company said. The app, which was developed in-house, has already been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Bora Biçer, CPO at Sahibinden said:
"We are constantly working on a better user experience with our professional team, technology investments and R&D studies.
For the experience we have created in virtual tour, we developed our own algorithm in the field of photo-processing technology. We have proved once again that we are a technology company thanks to the virtual tour developed by our R&D team, which is made up entirely of Turkish engineers".
Our new service allows real estate experts to easily create ads with virtual tours, and promises a pleasant home tour experience to our users viewing real estate listings."
Northern Ireland's GCD Technologies has invested £1 million into PropertyNews.com to relaunch the sales and lettings property website.
GCD, which took ownership of the portal 12 months ago, will invest heavily in technology, staff, as well as branding and marketing as it seeks to turn PropertyNews into a go-to brand in the Northern Irish market.
GCD has had good going with PropertyNews since its 2021 acquisition of the portal, with sales listings up 35% and rental listings up 61%. The company has also reported that agent users have grown by 27%.
Emma Kerr, Managing Director at PropertyNews, said:
"This is a very exciting time for Propertynews and for GCD. We undertook significant brand and market research before embarking on a rebrand and we’re really pleased to bring a refreshed platform to the market to help us serve our agent customers even better and to attract even more homebuyers and renters to the site. We have invested significantly in the website and to expand the team.
In conjunction with our estate agent partners, we look forward to continuing to grow the business strongly into the months and years ahead."
Egypt-based marketplace AqarMap.com.eg has introduced a new search function for homebuyers to find off-plan properties based on a variety of criteria.
The "compound adviser" tool (where 'compound' refers to local gated communities) feature includes search criteria for location, property type, price bands, payment method, and developer experience among others.
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